


in the darkness i will meet my creators

by Victorian_Asylum



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Destroy Arcadia Bay ending, F/F, time skip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-06
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-07-29 15:21:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7689754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Victorian_Asylum/pseuds/Victorian_Asylum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>and they will all agree that i'm a suffocator </p>
<p>or</p>
<p>max must live with her choices</p>
            </blockquote>





	in the darkness i will meet my creators

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe it's been over a year since I last posted a Life is Strange story. But I had to get this thing out of my system.

_"It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.”_

**Janet Fitch ~ White Oleander**

~ 

Max toys with time like an infantile deity, playing with lives and timelines as one would amateurishly play the piano, tapping the keys to find a certain sound. Even now it feels like second nature, she doesn't have to own up her mistakes, because now no one knows she made them except herself, righting the wrongs she has done and removing them from the fabric of this timeline. Does that make her a good person? No, it's rather sociopathic to live as a perfect person, but she has the live with something she could never fix, so she controls everything else in her life.

She freelances now. It was rough, trying to establish herself without ever having been taught how, but there was no way in hell she was going to work with someone else. Not after him. But she's in a decent position now, pays the bills and then some, and she’s getting there. No one has ever asked about it until today, when her client casually says, “So I heard you went to Blackwell. They had a pretty prestigious photography programme, right? Some famous photographer too.”

Max freezes, her arm raised like a shield and she almost rewinds the whole day just to decline him but she doesn't. Instead, through trembling lips, unable and unwilling to even speak that name, she says, “Yeah, they did.”

“Tragic, what happened. Everyone dead. Lucky you weren't there, huh?”

She sees bodies gliding past at 35 miles per hours, rubble and seawater, lost animals, ocean and air having fought a town. The town lost. Everyone who didn't even know there was going to be a war, predisposed casualties in their destined graves. She was a God who gambled with their lives, traded them like commodities to get what she truly wanted. So yes, tragic. Yet like all gods that sin was not hers to bear, absolved of all guilt. She still felt it, so perhaps she existed a lesser one, or her time on earth made her a little less holy. “Truly blessed,” is all she answers. And that is final.

When she gets home after a long day of numbing herself just to function, she closes the door to her and Chloe’s apartment and slides to the floor with her head in her hands. All gods are cursed to be alone, the burden they carry in exchange for power. But Max is not alone, and that is her transgression for which she must atone. She won't. She can't. She has gone this far, she can't go back. This one life she has saved is worth more than her ticket to heaven.

///

Max dreams she is afloat in the ocean. The sea chants softly to her, psalms in foreign tongues. Above her the sky bleeds. She feels nothing. Hands tug at her body, grabbing with desperation as if they are drowning and only she can save them. Their tugs weaken and weaken, until they slip beneath the water.

It begins to rain.

Ashes and ashes and ashes.

///

Nothing is the same.

Arcadia Bay changed both of them. Chloe, before the hurricane blew, Max because of it. The bones of Rachel shook Chloe to her core and shut down something fundamental to how she interacts with the world. Max can't blame her, the girl loved Rachel, stored her hopes and dreams of a better life with her. Max knows she’ll never have all of Chloe’s heart, a part of it will always be buried in that junkyard, never to return. She's just glad the rest of Chloe's heart remained on the inside like it was supposed to.

Max finds her atop the apartment building, legs swung over the edge and a cigarette glowing in her mouth. The view from here is no Time’s Square, but the street lamps and headlights and neon signs from the 24 hour store on the corner light up Chloe’s skeletal framework. Max takes a seat next to her, looks down at the street 7 stories below.

Chloe glances at Max. The last few years have been rougher and rougher on her, sandpaper on a withering soul. She's always been good at giving the illusion of being put together, but Max can see through all the cracks and observe the dim flame inside, still stubbornly holding on. “Do you believe in destiny, Max?” she asks.

“No.” The answer is immediate. She has long since lost the magical innocence that allowed her to entertain such a carefree belief. She creates destiny. If the world is not bending to her ideals, Max makes it kneel before her and repent. “Do you?”

“I can't,” Chloe says, taking a long drag. The smoke curls around her face as she exhales, an angel framed by the temptations of morality. “If I do, that means Rachel had to die. That's bullshit.”

Max remains silent, the guilt still threatening to choke her after all this time. Those people weren't destined to die, not that anyone is. But she chose their fates. They did not receive the chaotic hand of time that snubs out all life. Instead, her own methodical fingers moved them like pawns to their fate, sacrificed in the name of the queen.

“Does it get easier?” Chloe asks.

Max shrugs. “I think so. That's what they say.” She has yet to see the results, that moment when sadness is mellowed into acceptance, the pain into a dull ache that only surfaces here and there. She wants absolution, though she doubts she’ll find any. For Chloe, at least, it will get better in the end. She has to learn, or she’ll live in the shadow of graves until she herself becomes one. Max leans her head on Chloe’s shoulder, content to let silence overtake them. Moments of deep contemplation aren't new. They both struggle with what happened to their homes and their lives.

Chloe’s laugh is tinged with a gravel timbre, smoke warmed and whiskey brewed. “It's welcome to come anytime. It's been too fuckin’ long.”

///

It's the law of the universe. Chloe is alive in this timeline, so there exists one where she isn't. And Max is here in this one, so somewhere out there is one where he killed her. Logically, that meant Rachel survived to fight another day in multiple other universes. The problem was they couldn't get there. Max could bend and break and manipulate time all she wanted, but she could not pull the fabric of other realities any closer. That was a gap even she could not bridge.

Chloe told her once that it's moments like this that make her feel closest to her other lives. When Max’s head is between her thighs, the only space being the emptiness between atoms, two people desperately trying to overcome the circumstances of reality and truly feel each other.

Max focuses on the present, the soft moans escaping Chloe’s lips, the way her fingers tangle in Max’s hair to ground herself, lest she float away to a limbo between worlds. This is the only reality Max wants to exist in, surrounded by Chloe, the taste, the smell, the sounds of her, thighs warming her freckled cheeks. This is the first and the last person she wanted, desperately, fervently, oxygen to her blood. This is the one she gave up everything for, broke herself, rearranged the alignment of what is, was, and is to come to carve a space for this woman.

Max knows Chloe loses herself to find herself in another place. For the moment, she ceases to exist in this timeline and throws herself into another, imagining the other worlds where the people she loves most still live. As terrifying as it is for Max, who sees the universes Chloe no longer inhabits, who lives with the memories of dead and dying Chloe, she doesn't protest. These are the only times Chloe can see them, the way she wants to remember them, perfect and happy and healthy. They live on only in her, and the thoughts of them will die with her.

The irony is not lost, the little death to feel alive. The act itself is transcendent, whether it's sensual and slow, or fast, raw, primal, the kind that left bruises and scratches, fear and anger flowing through fingertips and into the skin.

Chloe comes undone quietly, a sigh of release as her body goes slack and she returns, leaking like water into this world. Max lays down beside her, stares at the popcorn ceiling above her, finds shapes and symbols and stories inside. It only takes a moment or so for Chloe to become real again, and when she does, she reaches for the bottle of bourbon on her nightstand and takes a swig, offering it to Max afterwards.

Max isn't much of a drinker, she finds most alcohol to be rather disgusting, but sometimes she needs it, to remind herself she’s here, with bourbon that tastes like shit to her but warms her stomach all the same. So she takes a drink and they pass it back and forth, until Max is pleasantly buzzed. She declines any more, tastebuds effectively ruined for the night.

She turns onto her side, watches Chloe in the moonlight. Ethereal is not the word for her, she is not other worldly, so much as she doesn't fully exist anymore, straddling the murky line between concept and reality. Maybe the bourbon in her stomach is the only thing making her real right now. Maybe when she sobers up in the morning she’ll disappear as if she was never there to begin with.

The thought settles like stones in Max’s stomach and she curls around Chloe, pressing her fingers into her skin to make sure they won't pass through.

“Lil late to be possessive,” Chloe says, watching Max with tired affection. Her old self glimmers into being sometimes, a few glorious seconds of a time when everything seemed so simple. But those moments are rare, and she lives now as a recreation of who she used to be, a front to mask the void she has become.

“No, there's always someone trying to snatch you.” It's true, in a humorous and deeply saddening way, but Chloe brushes off the latter and chuckles, wrapping an arm around Max.

“Don't sweat it, I'm practically unsnachtable. They'd give me back in a week anyway.”

Max smiles at that, reaches over to take hold of Chloe’s free hand. She opens it up, runs her fingertips over the roughened palms. Chloe always had hardened hands, world weary hands that acted as shields. Max traces the dips and grooves. Dana could read palms, she remembers. She would always explain what your fate had in store in the warmest way.

Did Chloe’s explain her fate? Did she even believe that? Does Max?

Max thinks about all the possibilities held inside those hands. “They're called daughter universes, y’know.”

Chloe sets the bottle back down. “Hmm?”

“What I've created. Everytime I rewind I'm making a choice. When I make a choice I'm splitting the universe in half, creating two of them. The choice I made, and the one I didn't.”

A flicker of something passes through Chloe’s eyes. The realization of what that means. A classic case of you can't get there from here, but the knowledge that somewhere beyond comprehension exists all the things that have been lost. Did that make it better, more bearable, a softer blade to feel as it twists around your ribs?

Three pauses too many, then, “Even the universe bends to you Mad Max.”

No, it doesn't bend enough.

///

It's always conversations that are meaningful and meaningless. They talk about it but then again they never really do. It's metaphors and looks and whispers and a few “I’m sorry”’s mixed in with fucking and self-loathing and guilt in any order.

Underneath it all, Max wonders, was it worth it.

Or, could she have been the sacrifice.

Should she.

In the end she simply wasn't enough.

///

Her parents don't worry, but then again they don't know. Max can't bring herself to tell them. They wouldn't believe her and even if they did, who would want a daughter who killed an entire town for one girl. The only thing they can tell is her bone deep weariness. So they surprise her by paying for a vacation to Hawaii. “You look ready to fall asleep on your feet” they joke.

So she and Chloe fly across an ocean and try to lose themselves together.

Naturally, Max brings her cameras, Polaroid and digital, and documents everything. It's a lot of Chloe, swimming, smiling, attempting to hula, trying to convince a fire dancer to let her try, giving up in the middle of ukulele lessons and jumping off a lot of cliffs. There's also sunsets and seas, surf boarders and waves and waterfalls and wildlife, flowering things and rebirth.

Halfway through the vacation, most of the hotel has retired for the night, save for a few relaxing in the pool. Max and Chloe pull up chairs to the ocean until the waves lap at their feet. Stars wink across the sky. Chloe sips whiskey, Max at coconut water.

“We were born on the wrong side of the ocean,” Chloe says, “this is so much better and hella less rainy.”

It starts at the ocean. It ends in the ocean. Everything in between finds its way to the sea like tributary streams to a river then a gulf. Max suspects it's one of those inescapable facets of her life, that it's never quite done with her. A reminder, a keeper for the souls it took. And, she supposes, she is its minder, the god haunted by its own failures. Still, the one thing she got right is far more precious than than the watery jewel before her.

“Hey Max lemme see your hand,” Chloe says, rather quickly, but Max pays no mind, just absentmindedly offers her hand and watches the stars, what exists and does not, and idly wonders if there is anything else staring back at her, wondering if she too still exists.

Chloe drops something into Max’s open palm and she turns to look at it. It shimmers in the light. A ring. The wheels turn in her head, slow moving and cautious, but by the time it registers Chloe is already speaking. “I know I'm supposed to get down on my knees and spout romantic shit,” she begins, looking uncharacteristically nervous, but in true Chloe fashion continues on, whiskey fueled and drawn to Max by fate, the singular vice of a simple woman. “But we've been through so much shit together. You fucking rewrote the universe for a fuckup stoner like me. I mean that's some star crossed lover shit. But you get me. All of me, and that's something no one has ever done. You don't judge me. I wanna marry you. Be with you until the end of this life and into the next. So what’ya say?”

Max looks at the ring, then back to Chloe, who sits there waiting, and she feels so extraordinarily out this world it's incredible. It's almost as if she isn't herself, doesn't bear the crosses and the graves and the sadness in her sternum. For the moment she feels whole. She is aware of the waves and her heartbeat, the soft voices far behind them, every singular atom that ever came into creation, it all seems to stop for her and the one she loves.

But, wait, there's still social graces. The world rumbles to life, Max falls back into herself and says, “Of course. You're my partner in time.”

The grin that marks Chloe’s face could outshine any diamond or gold. It's worth everything. She slips the ring onto Max’s finger. “As long as you're my partner in crime.”

///

Max dreams of herself as a stream of consciousness floating through the creation of the galaxy. Stardust swirls around her, forms and explodes in dazzling colors. She sees planets and stars and supernovas, black holes that destroy, and forces that create. She comprehends no time. She simply is. No pain, no worries, no thoughts. She is the universe and the universe is her.

The only thing she feels is a sense of relief and forgiveness, as if something in the vastness of the void calls to her, urging to to let go. Of what, she does not know, for she understands nothing but the principles of creation and destruction. The feeling persists. It urges something inside her, caters to something that will, perhaps, become human somewhere in this unending field of matter. The word sounds familiar.

She wonders as best a force could wonder what there could possibly be to forgive. Surely not the atoms and what they compare, for they've no knowledge of what they do. And then the answer comes to her.

The only thing here in this universe to forgive.

Her.


End file.
